That, approximately, is the go-to question put forward in defense of women who come under scrutiny after coming forward with questionable allegations of sexual assault or other misconduct, as in the current matter of Brett Kavanaugh. It is the wrong question.

Or, more precisely: It is the wrong question if what we desire to do is
to get as near as we can to the truth of the matter at hand. It is an
excellent question if your desire is something else, especially
misdirection. “Why would she lie?” is a question that obliges us to
engage in mind-reading and redirects us from answerable questions to
unanswerable ones. As a rhetorical ploy, it is transparent: Engaging the
question puts Kavanaugh’s defenders and would-be defenders in a
difficult position, and it puts Kavanaugh’s antagonists in an easier
position, from which they may point and shriek that their opponents are
victimizing an already victimized woman without any dispositive evidence
to support their claim. It’s silly and sophomoric — which,
unfortunately, means that it is likely to be effective in our current
political environment, which is dominated by hysteria, dishonesty, and
stupidity.

But we know, from recent history, that people do lie about
such things. Or (sometimes) come to believe that things happened,
that didn't.

I went to a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few years
ago thrown by a pioneering academic and her connected wife. The
assembled group of brilliant young professors and researchers
promised a stimulating evening.

It was anything but. After the opening small talk devolved into the
political, the air was full of complaints about inequality and
poverty, racism, sexism, fascist Republicans, and how, in general,
everything is going to hell. I stifled myself as long as I could,
but finally I piped up—that’s not what’s really going on. Have you
actually looked at the numbers? For the past 25 years, the world has
only been getting better. People are healthier, wealthier, more
educated, and living longer, better lives than humans ever have.

Silence. All eyes on me. Who threw the skunk in the room?

Then the shitstorm began. Of course, you’re wrong, things are not better, just look around—and it’s all just going to get worse yadda yadda. Shut me right up.

I usually don't quote this much, but Louis goes on to note something
important:

[P]olitics—which has now come to infect all aspects of our lives—isn’t a rational response to reality. It’s partially about currying social favor with desired cohorts; but, worse, it’s emotional pathology.

In
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich wrote that
politics can be the outward manifestation of personal emotional
problems. Instead of working on our own issues, some instead work
them out on society at large. (Sound familiar?)

We’re living through a moment when this phenomenon is vivid. The
unease among elites of the first world, the palpable emotional
distress of our friends, the media’s daily two minutes of hate, the
social media flash mobs, the tribalism, the way every aspect of our
lives has become political.

That might seem to be an odd thing to note on a blog that
concentrates on current-event politics. It's easy to apply Louis's
observation to others, difficult to apply to oneself. That probably
means that it's important to see how it applies to oneself.

At City Journal, Henry I. Miller wonders if there's some way
that we could tell if our politicians are
Fit to Serve?

Perhaps we should ask candidates (and incumbents), including the president and vice president, to volunteer for periodic testing of intelligence, mental status, and psychopathology. After all, we often demand to know whether a candidate has recovered from open-heart surgery, cancer, or strokes, and many states require elderly drivers to get relicensed. Testing could answer speculations about mental fitness, one way or the other.

I've noted before that politicians are likely to score more than a
couple sigmas off the norm on a number of personality traits. Some
of that is inevitable, some of that is probably beneficial, but…

Even if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, he
will carry scars from the brutal process to get him there.... [A]s
he limps over the finish line... the question could soon shift from
whether he will be confirmed to what kind of justice he will be.

Will Kavanaugh... dig in on the far right, radicalized by the experience? Will he swing the other way towards the middle, determined to improve his reputation among women? Or will he be able to move past it entirely?...

Uh huh. As
Instapundit
summarizes: "After the way we’ve abused him, he can’t possibly be
objective or fair to us."

Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain
fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding
truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly
established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their
scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other
departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not
scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been
growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking.
For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside
the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

The complete set of ludicrous papers, with their publication
results, is provided. Including "Chapter 12 of Volume 1 of Mein
Kampf with fashionable buzzwords switched in".

At best, then, the hoax shows that some poor-quality papers sometimes get published in marginal academic journals, and sometimes (but less frequently) get published in mainstream journals. That’s it. But this isn’t very surprising. After all, while peer-review if often held up as the gold standard of academic gate-keeping we have to keep in mind that low-performing academics have peers too. Just like the “Conceptual Penis” hoax that the same hoaxers made much to-do about last year this hoax thus doesn’t tell us anything at all about the overall quality of the academic subfields targeted.

Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
blogger.

Pun Salad is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates
Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for the blogger to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.